The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (34 page)

gob: slang for sailor in the U.S. Navy.

“Back Home in Tennessee”:
“Just Try to Picture Me (Back Down Home in Tennessee),” 1915 song with lyrics by William Jerome and music by Walter Donaldson.

Sally Carrol Hopper:
In “The Ice Palace” her name was “Happer.”

Liberty bonds:
bonds issued by the United States to pay for World War I.

Dresden figures:
The ceramic industry of Dresden, Germany, was known for elegant, hand-painted porcelain. Real lace was dipped in liquid porcelain and then applied to ceramic figurines. Dresden figures were thus delicate and fragile.

dope:
Coca-Cola.

Lady Diana Manners:
Diana Cooper (1892–1986), British actress and socialite known for unconventional behavior.

“Slow Train thru Arkansas”:
Thomas William Jackson’s 1903 book
On a Slow
Train Through Arkansas
convinced many readers that people in Arkansas didn’t wear shoes. The book cover depicts a train being held up by cattle on the tracks.

“Lucille”: Lucille, or, A Story of the Heart: A Pathetic Domestic Drama in Three Acts,
1836 play by William B. Bernard (1807–75).

“The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright:
Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944). During the first quarter of the twentieth century his novels outsold every other American writer.
The Eyes of the World,
published in 1914, is critical of the realism and naturalism in literature and art during this time. Dale B. J. Randall in “The ‘Seer’ and ‘Seen’ Themes in Gatsby and Some of Their Parallels in Eliot and Wright,” published in
Twentieth
Century Literature,
10 (1964), 61, notes similarities between
The Eyes of the
World
and
The Great Gatsby.
Both books deal with “the relationship between falseness and fame.” Randall also notes that the dust cover of
The Eyes of the
World
may have inspired the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg looking over the wasteland of ashes.

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

In the summer of 1915 Fitzgerald paid a visit to the Montana ranch of his Princeton classmate and lifelong friend Charles W. (Sap) Donahoe, and this visit inspired the setting for what would become his most extravagant fantasy, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The story provides a powerful foreshadowing of themes that Fitzgerald would develop more fully in
The Great Gatsby,
themes related to the emptiness of the American Dream and the carelessness and immorality of the very rich, who, like the Washingtons, care only about preserving the personal wealth that their diamond mountain represents. Fitzgerald began “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (originally entitled “The Diamond in the Sky”) in the fall of 1921 at White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and mailed the twenty-thousand-word manuscript to Ober on October 16, ten days before the birth of the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie, calling it “a wild sort of extravaganza partly on the order of The Off-shore Pirate + partly like The Russet Witch.” Though Fitzgerald had hopes that the conservative Satur
day Evening Post
would buy the story, he was not surprised when they declined to publish his scathing indictment of the American middle-class obsession with wealth. When
McCall’s
and
Harper’s Bazaar
also declined the story, Fitzgerald trimmed it to fifteen thousand words; and Ober eventually sold it for $300 to
The Smart Set,
which published it in their June 1922 issue. Fitzgerald selected “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” for inclusion in the “Fantasy” section of
Tales of the Jazz Age,
maintaining in the table of contents that he had written it “utterly for my own amusement.” Earlier he had lamented to Ober the fact that “a genuinely imaginative thing like The Diamond in the Sky brings not a thing,” while “a cheap story like The Popular Girl written in one week while the baby was being born brings $1500.”

St. Midas’ School:
fictional school, the naming of which references the legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched to gold.

Ritz-Carlton Hotel:
luxurious hotel at Madison and 46th Street in New York City.

duvetyn:
good-quality wool with a smooth, plush appearance like velvet.

Tartar Khan:
The Mongolian Tatar tribe (often misspelled as Tartar) under Genghis Khan overran Asia and Russia during the thirteenth century.

Crœsus: Greek king of Lydia (560–546 B.C.) known for his wealth.

acciaccare:
an embellishing musical note.

Titania:
queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Gargantua:
fictional giant in stories by the French writer François Rabelais (1494 –1553). Gargantua was voracious and vulgar but intelligent and educated in humanist ideas of the Renaissance.

George Washington:
George Washington (1732–99), first president of the United States. Washington had no children.

Lord Baltimore:
Lord George Calvert Baltimore (circa 1580–1632), English statesman. He was refused permission to settle in Virginia. His son Cecil founded the colony of Maryland on land granted to him after his father’s death.

El Dorado:
mythical kingdom in South America rich with gold.

General Forrest:
Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–77), Confederate cavalry leader. He is believed to be one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.

first Babylonian Empire: circa 1850–1600 B.C.

to peach on you:
to betray.

Pro deo et patria et St. Mida: Latin for “For God and country and St. Midas.”

canteen expert:
The Red Cross, YMCA, and other charities set up hospitality centers for soldiers. Young women hosted the coffee and hot chocolate bars and entertained the soldiers.

Empress Eugénie:
Eugénie Marie de Montigo (1826–1920), empress of France as wife of Napoleon III. Noted for extravagance, she lived in exile after 1870.

Nemesis:
Greek goddess that dealt out divine justice and avenged wrongdoing.

Prometheus Enriched:
reference to Aeschylus’ drama
Prometheus Bound
and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Prometheus Unbound.” (
See note 30 to “Head
and Shoulders.”
)

God was made in man’s image:
Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

cut me off with a hot coal:
Rather than waiting for blisters to heal, a hot coal might be applied to them, popping the blister and cauterizing the wound. Scar tissue formed.

WINTER DREAMS

In his scrapbook beneath a quarter-page photograph of his first serious love, Ginevra King, and an announcement of her coming wedding in September 1919, Fitzgerald penned this handwritten line: “THE END OF A ONCE POIGNANT STORY.” The love story of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra King, which began during the Christmas holidays of 1914 and ended when she threw him over “with the most supreme boredom and indifference,” is at the heart of “Winter Dreams,” the most important of the stories that anticipate the subjects and themes of
The Great Gatsby
. The writing of “Winter Dreams” was begun while the Fitzgeralds lived with their ten-month-old daughter, Scottie, at the White Bear Yacht Club outside St. Paul, Minnesota, during late August 1922; he finished it in mid-September in St. Paul’s Commodore Hotel, shortly before the Fitzgeralds returned to New York for the publication of
Tales of the Jazz Age.
In the version of “Winter Dreams” bought by
Metropolitan
for $900 and then published in the December 1922 issue (the version reprinted in this volume), Fitzgerald’s full-paragraph description of Judy Jones’s house at the beginning of section three is used with only slight alteration to describe Daisy Fay’s house in chapter eight of
The Great Gatsby.
In the version of “Winter Dreams” that Fitzgerald revised for inclusion in his third story collection,
All the Sad Young Men
(1926), he removed virtually the entire paragraph of description of the house. This is but one of many substantive changes Fitzgerald would make when he revised the story; but this one is particularly interesting since it suggests that Fitzgerald did not wish to draw attention to the fact that he had taken descriptions from his “popular” fiction and put them in
The Great Gatsby,
which had appeared less than a year before
All
the Sad Young Men.
The most important connections between “Winter Dreams” and
The Great Gatsby,
of course, lie in the parallels between Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby, between Judy Jones and Daisy Fay, and between the relationships in two of Fitzgerald’s most beautiful love stories.

bloomers:
full, loose trousers gathered at the knee.

knickerbockers:
pants that rolled up just below the knee. The style came from Dutch settlers in New York in the 1600s.

“The Pink Lady” and “The Chocolate Soldier” and “Mlle. Modiste”:
Broadway musicals.

coupé:
two-door automobile.

the war came to America:
Congress voted to enter World War I on April 6, 1917. The war ended with the armistice on November 11, 1918. The battles were all fought in Europe.

ABSOLUTION

In his
Ledger,
Fitzgerald recounted an episode in his life when, at the age of eleven, he lied in confession by saying to a priest, “Oh, no, I never tell a lie.” This event is the origin of his brilliant story “Absolution,” which, like “The Ordeal” and then “Benediction,” centers on a moral dilemma associated with a sacred rite in the Roman Catholic Church. In April 1924, just before leaving Great Neck, New York, to live on the French Riviera, where Fitzgerald would complete
The Great Gatsby,
he wrote about “Absolution” and his novel-in-progress to Maxwell Perkins: “Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged & in approaching it from a new angle, I’ve discarded a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story).” Then in late June, after writing the draft of the novel that would be published in April 1925, he wrote Perkins that “Absolution” was to have been “the prologue of the novel.” Years later Fitzgerald would write in a letter that the story “was intended to be a picture of [Gatsby’s] early life.” Understandably Fitzgerald’s comments have prompted speculation about the circumstance of the story’s composition and its relationship to
The Great Gatsby.
“Absolution” may indeed have been a prologue to a very early draft of the novel that Fitzgerald began while he and Zelda lived in Great Neck between mid-October 1922 and April 1924. This draft of the novel, however, does not survive. The manuscript that Fitzgerald wrote on the Riviera during the summer and fall of 1924, in essence the version of
The
Great Gatsby
that was finally published, does not, of course, contain “Absolution ” as a prologue. After its publication in the June issue of
American Mercury,
Fitzgerald selected “Absolution” for inclusion in his beautifully haunting 1926 collection
All the Sad Young Men,
which also contained his Gatsby-related “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “ ‘The Sensible Thing,’ ” as well as what was perhaps truly his last flapper story, “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les.”

the valley of the Red River:
the Red River Valley in northwestern Minnesota has broad, flat prairies.

“Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!”:
perhaps a reference to Samuel Blatchford (1820–93), who was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1882–93).

second wave of German and Irish stock:
German immigration to Minnesota peaked in the 1860s and ’70s. Germans left because of overcrowded cities, lack of jobs, and inheritance laws leaving land only to the eldest son. The Minnesota Territory and Northern Pacific Railway advertised in Germany for immigrants. In 1878 there was a second wave of Irish immigrants escaping famine. Swedes left Sweden because of religious persecution, the lack of land, and mandatory military service, and were attracted to Minnesota because of the farmland and jobs available in the timber industry and iron mining. Railroad transportation sped settlement of the territory. The immigrants took advantage of the Homestead Act to become land-owners.

James J. Hill:
James J. Hill (1838–1916), wealthy railroad magnate of the Gilded Age. After acquiring railroad properties, he formed the Great Northern Railway Company in 1889. He and J. P. Morgan won a fight with Edward Harriman and Jacob Schiff for control of the Northern Pacific. Known as “the Empire Builder,” he started with nothing but a vision of the future.

Alger books:
Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–99), popular American writer of boys’ adventures. He wrote 118 novels in book form, another 280 in magazines, and more than 500 short stories. Most of his stories had a “rags to riches” theme, with young protagonists who found success through pluck and luck.

collection of cigar-bands:
Collecting cigar bands and labels was a popular hobby in the first decades of the twentieth century. The chromolithographed labels produced from 1860 to 1920 were beautiful works of art.

reform
school:
perhaps the Minnesota State Training School in Red Wing.

“Domini, non sum dignus . . . anima mea”: part of the Latin Mass. Translation: “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”

“Corpus Domini . . . æternam”: “May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep my soul unto life everlasting.”

“Sagitta Volante in Dei”: Psalm 91:5, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”

things go glimmering: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
canto 2, stanza 2, by Lord Byron: “Ancient of days! august Athena! where, / Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul? / Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were.”